The Darkness we Expect
by Hedgi
Summary: Cisco's vibe gave no context to the fight. The future is a threat, not a promise. And Caitlin is not the only one who had an evil doppelganger. Character death.


Title from Mary Oliver's First Snow: "the darkness we expect/ and turn nightly from."

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The Darkness we Expect

She hadn't left. She had been ready to. Packed her things, just waiting for the lease to lapse. She'd looked for apartments, jobs, out of the state. Out of the country. Canada, maybe. Or she could go to the middle of Australia, 120 degree heat and no people for miles, safe. Free. But she had stayed. Barry and Cisco, Iris and Wally, Clarissa and Joe, they'd all convinced her to stay. She was her own person. She wasn't Killer Frost. She wasn't, she wasn't, she never would be. All she had to do was try. Fight it, the darkness that they told her wasn't even in her. She wasn't like Frost, she wasn't like Zoom. All she had to do was be herself. Cisco had made her a suit, given her dampeners engraved with frost flowers that she could remove whenever she chose. Barry had been cautious for a day or so, and then things had gone back to normal, except that he always made sure not to bring her iced coffee from Jitters runs. When the team went out for fun, they avoided ice cream and got sliders instead. Things had seemed…better. The future was a threat, not a promise, after all, the future had never been set in stone. She was herself, no one else, they told her. She had wanted so badly to believe it was true.

And now, in the December chill 30 miles outside of the city, at the edge of the forest just west of the Badlands, she knew they were right. She was Caitlin Snow, MD, Ph.D. She was Caitlin Snow, widow, superhero ER, Metahuman. And she was not the one who had turned into her doppelganger.

"Cisco, stop," she shouted, throwing up her hands to create a wall of ice that shattered easily, covering the ground like loose diamonds, like broken glass. "This isn't you!"

He shook his head. She could not see his eyes behind the goggles. She did not need to. "Don't act like you know what is and isn't me, Caitlin. Don't pretend you understand."

"I do—" She could tell from the way her bones ached that the vibrations were changing, that he was pulling sound in from around him. Blue light danced in his gloved hands, and she flung her arms out. The icicles, too, shattered in the vibrational blast, the sonic shockwave that sent her reeling back, slamming into a tree. The blood froze on her lip. "Stop this, we can help you! We can go back to STAR—"

"To the pipeline. To the prison I built. No Thank you." He raised his hands again, and the soft sounds of the forest, what was left, with the larger animals gone, dulled. Again, the blast spiraled out from his palms, hardly even visible except where it caught in the bits of dust and mast stirred up by the fight, the frost that had coated branches. "Give up. I'm not him. Not anymore."

Caitlin drew from the wellspring inside her, remembered the way Sara Lance had once tried to teach her to throw knives. Remembered what had led to this. The bodies, bones hardly more than powder, eardrums bleeding. "You're right," she whispered, and her gaze hardened. This would not be the first time she had to fight the face of someone she had once called a friend. A face she had once loved. If she had anything to say, it would be the last.

The shards of ice were caught in the spiral of sonic energy, one she had little doubt would kill her if it reached its target. Time seemed frozen, the way everything must always have seemed to Barry. And then the burst through. The pulse faded out, nothing more than a puff of a breeze on her cold cheeks, pushing a strand of white hair back, like a final breath. He staggered back, then fell, silent. Her ice daggers had struck their mark, and part of her wished she could cry.

Instead, she spoke into the comm unit in her ear. "Joe, Wally, I… I got Reverb. It's over." She collapsed on the forest floor, her suit protecting her from the ice and stones and sharp ends of sticks as she hugged herself, not for warmth, but for something else, the ghost of a hug. "It's over," she repeated, hollow. Staring at the ground so she wouldn't have to look at the body, she wished she had left months ago. Perhaps then, it would have been her.

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You're welcome

:)


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